Prophet Zarquon

Haven’t looked at MX Linux before, thanks for the info!

Like I said, I really can’t care much about window managers at this point. Mostly, I’m tired of having multiple window managers installed after just a few app installs. If I start out with Gnome\Plasma, I’ll surely end up wanting some apps that have only been made for KDE, & vice versa. Never once have I seen a Linux machine that had all the apps I’d want, using just one window manager.

I suppose most apps could be compiled from source to run on one or the other, but alternative compiles have invariably been a hassle to me…

Since I end up needing at least two window managers installed anyway & they keep changing generations about 10x as often as I change machines, it’s pointless for me to have a preference. The best window manager is whichever one each developer of each app happened to use?!?

Hahahah, very!

I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; “Media Monkey” etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.

For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.

Same.

Weird: I just noticed that I have seekbar preview on my desktop install of VLC, but not mobile. Now I want to compare to the Win version as well, because I’m noticing some menus look different than I remember.

Honestly, I install VLC just to snag the file-associations away from the WMP / Windows Video apps, because they remain insecure by default.

No. I’m open to suggestions.

If I had to install right now, it would be Debian, just out of familiarity.

Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, even Kali are fundamentally changed from when I last tried them.

Linux window managers change more often than I need to reinstall; I get really tired of picking a distro based largely on its choice of window manager, just to end up with Gnome installed anyway after a few packages fetch their dependencies.

The other nice thing about running vanilla Debian (or Ubuntu) is that at least some of the documentation for some apps, will be applicable!?

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I’m just glad when I see media with a plot that I don’t immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

I feel like you replied to someone else’s comment?
Gimp feels just like Photoshop before Creative Suite editions…
Everything that’s not MS Paint, feels like a huge upgrade to me. On Windows, I open Paint.NET as often as any other image editor, just because I don’t need more than that for most copy\paste\crop\color tasks.

I haven’t done any illustration or background\logo art in about 20 years. I’m not even sure what features are considered most defining, for a good image editor these days?

That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC… I haven’t really had any reason to install MPC in… wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.

What shit did I start? I agree 100% with the sentiment of this post’s OP: Teachers moving to corporate marketing jobs just to get a survivable wage, is a tragedy of first order. The people who do our societies most vital work are not rewarded anywhere near commensurate with the importance of their work; hence my reading of this post.

I was joking about needing 18650 cells as a point of reference for pricing… mostly. I really don’t have any sense of the prices of those other commodities you mentioned. Regardless, based on what you said, it seems like Australian teachers are better off than here, but still grossly undervalued?

And no, I hated the musical episode of Strange New Worlds because it wasn’t up to my expectations based on their invoking of Buffy The Musical, but I loved most of Discovery & Stamets is freaking gold. I didn’t really think they could top the engineering hijinks until Tig Notaro as Jet Reno was introduced. She’s a treasure.

I have had good luck finding what should be basic essential goods from overseas brands, when the major US brands stop making them. I was unironically, seriously, asking if you or anyone here could suggest a brand of jeans that still comes in loose fit black, as that’s literally all I can wear to work & need them for life as well. Sorry to derail the topic; I was leery of that, but Australia has good stuff sometimes so I figured I’d risk it!

It did lead to one, but he didn’t last forever, & again, I think it’s pretty hard to argue they were better off before than after.

Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it’s a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I’d compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.

I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.

If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn’t even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it’s like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.

Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal’s interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal’s workflows make Blender look like Maya.

Aw man, that’s just enough difference to make me notice.

Now I’ve got a weird question purely out of curiosity: Do you know of any makers of black denim cotton work jeans, in loose fit that isn’t stretch knit?

Wrangler & Levi seem to have decided that black jeans which fit over one’s thighs, are not important enough to make in all sizes anymore… ?

The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.

Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it’s not FOSS (& won’t run on any of my machines anyway).

Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that’s some sort of perennial “gotcha!” joke, at this point?)

Shotcut crashes unexpectedly, on all the machines I’ve tried it on. Not frequently though, & it was so good I used it anyway.

I’m pretty sure that the masking features of OBS (potentially even VLC) could be paired with a camera aimed at the display, to crop interlopers out of a projected image, so that they don’t get painted\blinded with projected light. Very niche utility, but I’m not aware of any hardware-only solutions for it, & its potentially show\life-saving

Yes, OnlyOffice has been my choice for a while now; not that I need it much anymore, thankfully

The number of times I’ve needed to do something, then realized VLC already did it… Wow

Even had use for the video wall options, a few times.

I do get annoyed, setting the hotkeys & seek distances, to something actually useful, every time I install VLC

Option 3 is the usual method, & it works quite fast on almost any machine that’s even capable of decoding high bitrate video fast enough to keep up with its framerate, in the first place. On a HDD, that previous frame may briefly require seeking to get back to, but no such delay occurs with flash storage.

Of course, it doesn’t need to be done fast; we’re talking about long looks at single frames!

For best results, frame-capture apps use cross-frame interpolation with motion estimation (& these days, AI).

I don’t remember the last device I saw, that would struggle with this in any way. It’s basically just been dismissed as unimportant, by the VLC devs, rather than actually being all-that-difficult to implement.

I’m shocked that VLC doesn’t offer reverse playback by now, given the absolutely enormous video resources & random access storage, we’re all blessed with now.